Hollyweb

Stop the Hollyweb! No DRM in HTML5.

In case you didn’t know by now, Hollywood is trying to take over the world-wide web, too. When will enough be enough?

DRM (Digital ‘Rights’ Management) – for most people, ‘rights’ are actually ‘restrictions’ whether they are aware of it or not. For those with little or no money for lawyers, expensive equipment and only limited Internet access, the built-in rights management proposed for the next version of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) will further break the Internet into ‘have and have-not’ sections. — learn more

Applied Math and Media

Growing up during the Cold War in Kentucky gave my world-view a little less than complete treatment as to who I would become, what I would do for a living and how my relationships would later serve mainly to break my heart and hang me out to dry. In spite of all that, I managed to survive to my current age of 61 and am determined not to let the remainder of my life on Earth get dominated by the Evil One. I have wasted plenty of breath trying to convince certain close relatives and distant friends that something positive is going on in the world, completely separate and apart from what is reported on TV News programs. (There’s a reason they are called ‘programs’ by the way.)

Recently, I was introduced to an awesome term which to me represents that “lost chord” that The Moody Blues sent me in search of about four decades ago. If you’ve been following me along in my various web-spaces and spheres of influence (and confluence), you’ll “get”, as I have, the full scope of what this little term ‘syzygy‘ means in all of its glory as a generalized principle much akin to the meta-term SYNERGY of the 20th Century, which I learned of through reading books by R. Buckminster Fuller. Just have a look:

Syzygy (mathematics)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Syzygy (disambiguation).

In mathematics, a syzygy (from Greek συζυγία ‘pair’) is a relation between the generators of a module M. The set of all such relations is called the “first syzygy module of M“. A relation between generators of the first syzygy module is called a “second syzygy” of M, and the set of all such relations is called the “second syzygy module of M“. Continuing in this way, we derive the nth syzygy module of M by taking the set of all relations between generators of the (n − 1)th syzygy module of M. If M is finitely generated over a polynomial ring over a field, this process terminates after a finite number of steps; i.e., eventually there will be no more syzygies (see Hilbert’s syzygy theorem). The syzygy modules of M are not unique, for they depend on the choice of generators at each step.

The sequence of the successive syzygy modules of a module M is the sequence of the successive images (or kernels) in a free resolution of this module.

Buchberger’s algorithm for computing Gröbner bases allows the computation of the first syzygy module: The reduction to zero of the S-polynomial of a pair of polynomials in a Gröbner basis provides a syzygy, and these syzygies generate the first module of syzygies.

Further reading

Arduino for sensor-actuator networks

Arduino may easily do the jobs I was talking of earlier this year. As rainfall begins, the network across the topography will sense it, open some channels and close others and the dance will begin. Capturing the excitement and energy of a any event from a summer shower to a thunderstorm …

Sensor-actuator networks

Remote sensing and actuation are by no means new. The USGS has installed thousands of sensing units that yield terabytes of data for those who study and manage our watershed systems. Many a city uses remote control for everything from simple valve and pump mechanisms in treatment plants to sophisticated robotic cameras and listening stations for ghod knows what. Scaling these technologies down for use at the local level makes sense given the emergence of commons-based infrastructure and recent models for consensus-driven urban, rural and suburban planning.

Case in point: riparian zoning model – http://www.eightmileriver.org/zone/

Riparian zones can be fairly easily outfitted with sensors and actuators that can assist in long-term data modeling for ecosystem health and watershed management. Beyond “ownership and control” paradigms, new governance models are taking forms that allow groups of land users to bring a collective approach to committing to the extended maintenance of a local ecosystem. Of course nothing can take the place of human eyes and ears atop boots on the ground to enforce (substantiate) our claims to a better built environment, but web-enabled sensing and actuation can fill some specific needs.

I hope to attract some involvement toward building some testbeds in an around the Americas as has been done in Europe, Australia and other parts. I believe that commons based peer production is better than patents and trade secrets, by the way.

attention: tibi – Sensorica.com